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While many brands were built using TV and traditional media, the landscape has changed dramatically. Consumer behaviour is shifting, so reaching people who don’t watch linear TV poses a challenge. Brand advertisers need to be able to reach users wherever they are in the increasingly fragmented media landscape. Gaming is one area ripe with opportunities for brand advertising.

There’s a growing need for innovation within digital that can help advertisers communicate with consumers who are hard to reach through traditional channels. The gaming environment is a key area for marketers who are keen to explore and create new opportunities for brand advertising.

King – one of the largest entertainment companies in the world – launched their advertising platform to run across their portfolio of more than 200 titles. Nestlé was the first brand to trial this platform over the past year to bring their message to King’s audience. To power this new advertising experience, King worked with Google and DoubleClick.

"When looking at different technology platforms we wanted to choose a platform that could be innovative with us and help support a user experience in the same way that we drive great user experience with our game play."

- Ben Fox, VP of Business Development, King Advertising.

All advertising that runs on King Games is user-initiated. This means that the player gets to choose and engage in advertising for a value exchange, such as a reward – an extra life, currency or booster, for instance.

Giving the user the choice of whether to engage with an ad or not and when to do so creates a more positive experience overall and improves results for advertisers. “We’re finding that the players that actually consume advertising in that form are playing the games longer and having more fun,” says Ben Fox, VP of Business Development, King Advertising.

For Nestlé, the results from advertising in King Games have included a 99.5% view-through rate and a 3% click-through rate on Android. These outstanding metrics underline the fact that when an advertiser respects users’ choice, users reward the advertiser with their attention.

"The great beauty of running an ad in a video in a game is that we can offer something to the gamer and they hopefully will then view the ad. We give them a good value exchange: they see our ad, we give them a power up or an extra life."